1940 census draws historians and genealogists

WASHINGTON - A small clue to Bernice Bennett's past leapt out at her from the computer screen, on a scanned ledger filled with addresses entered with the precision penmanship that is a lost art.

It was 72 years ago that census workers fanned out across the country, visiting houses to personally count the 132 million people living in the United States in 1940. And now the National Archives has opened up the once-confidential details of daily life in a nation living in the vise of economic collapse and impending war.

Bennett found what she was looking for on a digitalized image of the original census ledger, scanned from more than 4,000 rolls of microfilm.

There was the name of Willie Mary Frazier, her father's cousin and a key player in Bennett family history. Frazier introduced Bennett's parents to each other. The census taker noted that Frazier worked as a maid in a private home and lived in a boarding house at 402 P St. NW. All the lodgers in the house were Black laborers from rural South Carolina who had moved to Washington during the Depression.

"I'm going to go to the house on P Street and take a picture," vowed Bennett, a retired public-health worker from Silver Spring, Md.

The 1940 census ledgers are being made public now because census records must remain confidential for 72 years -- a stretch mandated by law at a time when seven decades was assumed to be a normal life span. The release is generating excitement among historians, genealogists and that one person at all family reunions who keeps track of every branch of relatives. And, thanks to technology, the information will be more accessible, quicker, than that from any previous census.

Interest in the decades-old census has been high since it was made public last month, but only the most die-hard researchers can find what they're looking for.

For the time being, much of the 1940 census is in hard-to-search handwritten pages created by census takers in the days before printed forms were mailed out. The enumerators visited homes personally and asked residents questions such as where they were living five years earlier, and how much they had worked in the previous year. (For those with jobs, the answer was often 52 weeks). To find the records of a specific person, it's necessary to know his or her address at the time and a bureaucratic geography known as the enumeration district.

Eventually, the records will be more readily available.

More than 100,000 volunteers across the country, many of them genealogy buffs, are indexing the information from the ledger pages so it can be put up on a number of genealogical websites sponsoring the 1940 Census Community Project. When the tabulation is done, it will be possible to locate people by their names alone.

But many people already are combing through the records, discovering a time remarkably like our own, scarred by economic upheaval that cost many people their jobs and their homes, and experiencing a wave of immigration -- back then because people were fleeing Europe as World War II spread and deepened.

"You get a sense of how mobile people were, and of people moving around, trying to make a go of it and get work," said David Rencher, the chief genealogical officer for the Family History Museum in Salt Lake City. The museum is run by the Mormon Church.

"You see an era of economic downturn," he said. "You see the war effort. There are a number of parallels that are spot-on with today."

But the 1940 census also spotlights how much the country has changed in the span of just one lifetime. In 1940, the census counted 132 million people, compared with almost 309 million in the 2010 Census. Nine in 10 Americans were White, and almost everyone else was Black -- though the Associated Press reported recently that African Americans were undercounted by more than 1 million in 1940. Today, the United States is multiracial: 72 percent White, 13 percent Black and 5 percent Asian. Hispanics, who are 16 percent of the population and can be of any race, are the biggest ethnic minority.

The census also reflects vast changes in quality of life. In 1940, just 5 percent of adults had college degrees, compared with 28 percent today. Almost 80 percent of people living in rural areas had outdoor toilets. Less than a third had electricity, and even fewer had running water. And women earned 62 cents for every dollar men earned; after seven decades, it's up to 74 cents.

But what sends people searching into records collected when Franklin Roosevelt was still in his second term as president is the personal, telling detail that fills in family legend.

That quest sends many people to Kensington, Md., where the Church of the Latter-day Saints runs a Family History Center open to both Mormons and the general public doing genealogical research. On Mondays, officials close the doors to the public and turn the center over to African-Americans, guided by Bernice Bennett.

Alice Hunt Lindsey found what she was looking for. Herself.

She was just 2 in 1940, the youngest of six children of Alex and Julia Hunt living in North Carolina's Currituck County. Alex Hunt was a farmer. He told the census taker he had worked 52 weeks in the previous year. His wages were listed as zero.

"I just hoped I'd live long enough to see myself in the census," she said. "And now I have."